Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

3: The Origin of Species

When the views advanced in this volume, and by Mr. Wallace, or when analogous views on the origin of species are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.

Charles Darwin

Forced to Publish

Darwin felt that the interpretation of evolution he had worked out was “like confessing a murder.” He knew that it would be understood at once that his theory put the human being on an equal footing with monkeys and apes, even if he postponed writing explicitly about this aspect of the question. That Frenchmen (Lamarck) spread this kind of nonsense was scandalous, though less so than cutting their King and Queen’s heads off; but that an Englishman could utter such blasphemy and pretend to justify it was, to say the least, shocking. Darwin knew that publishing his theory would brand him publicly as a materialist and a freethinker, and that his beloved wife Emma would be hurt in her religious feelings. Therefore he delayed publishing the theory year after year, wrote furtively a summary of it somewhere along the way, and dissected countless barnacles, crustaceans resembling mussels which attach themselves to the ships’ hulls in clusters. Which Christian would take it gracefully that there was a monkey among the ancestors of Jesus Christ?

But in June 1858 Darwin received an envelope from overseas containing a hastily scribbled essay which, to his stupefaction, developed exactly the same thesis as his. If the author “had read my manuscript sketch written in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract!” Darwin wrote to Lyell in desperation. The author of the “twenty or so pages of text on rice paper” was Alfred Wallace (1823-1913), a former schoolteacher who had become a passionate naturalist, and was at that time exploring the Malay Archipelago. “I can have no fear of having to suffer for the study of nature and the search for truth,” he had once written.

Darwin had been five years on the Beagle; Wallace had been four years in Amazonia and would remain a full seven years in Malaysia. He escaped grave danger and even death on many occasions, and contracted malaria. It was during a bout of fever that he, too, read Malthus’ Essay on Population, and as he, too, had read Lyell’s Geology, he, too, had a sudden illumination. “There suddenly flashed upon me the idea of the survival of the fittest … The whole idea of specific modification [i.e. changes of the species] became clear to me, and in the two hours of my fit I had thought the main points of my theory.”¹

Charles Darwin had a problem. If he did not react and make his theory public without further delay, Wallace’s essay might be sent to others, and Darwin would loose the priority of a thesis on which he had worked for so many years and which had become the centre of his existence. Darwin had become an established naturalist with influential friends; Wallace was still practically unknown and in a far-away place on the globe; he was “someone who was no gentleman of science, but an obscure butterfly-collector.” The solution Darwin’s friends came up with was “to read both Wallace’s paper and Darwin’s sketch of 1844, along with a letter Darwin had written to [the Harvard geologist] Asa Gray on 5 September 1857, outlining his ideas (and thus establishing priority under the rules of the time), at the 1 July 1858 meeting of the Linnean Society.” “Wallace’s co-discoverer status with Darwin’s is generally accepted by all biologists and historians,” writes Michael Shermer.²

Yet there still are some who doubt the fairness of the 1848 procedure, and others who suspect Darwin of plagiarism and tampering with the date of a letter. “The balance of probabilities exonerates Darwin … And yet the miasma of conspiracy that hangs over the events of June-July [^1848] is not entirely dispelled,” finds Iain MacCalman.³ Lyell and Hooker were protecting their personal friend and social equal [i.e. Darwin], and defending the ranks and procedures of respectable science against the lower-class outsider Alfred Wallace.

“Had Darwin’s friends acted immorally? Certainly they had bent the rules to advance their friend’s position at Wallace’s expense.” In 1855 Wallace had published the “Sarawak Law paper”, which was “the first ever British scientific paper to claim that animals had descended from a common ancestor and then produced closely similar variations which evolved into distinct species.”⁴ This paper gave Wallace priority of publication of his theory of evolution, but it was not mentioned in the documentation of the case as presented at the decisive meeting of the Linnean Society. Moreover, everything was done post-haste without consulting Wallace. That Wallace afterwards humbly agreed to the whole procedure is of course no proof that it had been fair.

By this affair Darwin was at last sufficiently motivated to begin at once to write what would become his most famous, world-changing book.

The Book

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published on 24 November 1859.⁵ A.N. Wilson writes that it sold in quantities to rival the novels of Charles Dickens. On the day the book became available, all 1,250 copies were already subscribed to by the retail trade, so it went immediately into a second printing. “Almost overnight one book transformed the scientific and popular debate over biological origins … The staid voice of establishment in England, The Times of London, featured a wonderfully favourable review.”⁶ “Along with the Bible, De Revolutionibus [Copernicus], Principia Mathematica [Newton] and Das Kapital [Marx], Darwin’s Origin of Species must rank among the least read (at least in full) and most influential books of all time. It is no exaggeration to talk of it bringing about a Darwinian revolution.”⁷

“Today ensconced in our comfortable agnosticism, after a century [and a half] of exposure to the idea of evolution and quite inured to the idea of a universe without a purpose, we tend to forget just what a shock wave the advent of [Darwinian] evolution sent through the Christian society of Victorian England,” writes Michael Denton. “Darwin’s theory broke man’s link with God … Undoubtedly the most significant factor that contributed to the success of the Darwinian theory after 1859 was the fact that it was the first genuine attempt to bring the study of life on Earth fully into the conceptual sphere of science.”⁸

Even after the impact of the first shockwave, though, “Christian commitment was not the exception but the rule … Most of the leading scientists of Great Britain retained a Christian commitment.” (A.N. Wilson⁹) In a thunderstorm lightning strikes only after clouds have gathered, and one strike does not exhaust the storm. Revolutions are a sudden discharge of built up tensions and bring about a drastic change, usually through much destruction, but they do not make the world completely different at once. A religious doctrine, a strong bulwark of the mind constructed and reinforced over centuries, does not crumble from the first bolt of lightning or the impact of a new idea, in this case Darwinism. The remnants of the bulwark of Christianity, built up during the Middle Ages, are still standing in the Western world. Darwinism was one of the phenomena of scientific rationalism trying to de-construct that bulwark – after the Renaissance, the Reformation, the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, the Enlightenment, the Great Wars, the globalization, and the present confusion, presumably the end of the long process and a transition into a new world.

Darwin, midwife of the theory of evolution as understood in the common mind, has contributed to a change in the understanding of the world and humanity. “It was Darwin the symbol, Darwin the name which stood for a process, the name which was hurled from one side to the other in the polemics of secularist platforms or journals, an imaginary Darwin, a vague Darwin, without the comfortable homely substantial outlines of the real naturalist of a Kentish village, but however imaginary and however vague still bearing a direct relationship to a scientific achievement which few quite understood, the truth of which many doubted, but which everyone, without quite knowing what it was, knew to be a scientific achievement of the first magnitude.” (Owen Chadwick¹⁰)

The Darwin Sect

A new idea has to assert itself aggressively to stay alive and develop. Four in the vanguard of the defence of Darwin’s idea were Thomas Huxley, Charles Lyell, Joseph Hooker and Asa Gray. They were known as “the four musketeers.” Huxley, the fearsome fighter and passionate supporter of scientific naturalism, was called “Darwin’s bulldog” and “the Apostle of Unbelief,” which needs no clarification. Asa Gray was an American botanist and professor of natural history at Harvard University. He was one of the few persons Darwin kept informed about the progress of his thought and the publication of The Origin of Species. Like Lyell, Gray “staunchly supported” natural selection as the cause of new species, but contended, as a Christian, that the process was directed by providential influence rather than pure chance. Joseph Hooker, assistant director (later director) of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, was a close friend of Darwin. One may remember that it was he, together with Lyell, who organized the historic meeting of the Linnean Society where the priority of the evolution theory was adjudicated to Darwin.

It is intriguing that all four doubted, and even opposed, any theory of evolution, including the one of their friend Charles Darwin shortly before the publication of the Origin. Whether to Christian, atheist or agnostic, a theory of evolution, advancing that human beings descended from monkeys and ultimately from invisibly small life-forms, microbes, seemed at the time utterly unbelievable – even to naturalists who spend their days studying living beings, and trying to find explanations for their fantastic diversity, beauty and sometimes horror or apparent cruelty.

“As a passionate supporter of scientific naturalism, Huxley felt bound to lash evolutionary thinking as bad science. … All theories of development were, in Huxley’s mind, the product of metaphysical rather than naturalistic thinking.”¹¹ Lyell, in spite of his support for Darwin in 1858, will convert to his theory only ten years later. Gray will only accept a Christian variation of the theory. And even Hooker, Darwin’s closest friend, will remain doubtful till the book was published, despite having already mentioned the theory in previous writings.

André Pichot writes that Darwinism became aggressively anti-religious. McCalman’s recent book Darwin’s Armada confirms this contention in a surprising way. Darwin, Hooker and Huxley had, all three of them, been sea-going explorers for years and thus shared, in Huxley’s words, “a masonic bond in being well salted in early life.” Huxley “longed for science to be seen as a moral calling greater than any religion. … He and Hooker had effectively become joint leaders of a group of young scientists who wanted to reform Britain’s old guard of clerical dilettantism and entitlement.” They wanted to “swamp the parsons … to split science from theology.” Calman writes about Huxley’s “anticlerical ferocity” and quotes him as saying: “If I have a wish to live thirty years [more], it is that I see the foot of Science on the necks of her enemies.”¹²

Once they were converted and obliged to declare their positions when the Origin was published, Darwin encouraged his polemical friends in subtle ways. He began e.g. to speak of “our side” and to congratulate them on being “a good and compact body.” The exceptional cohesion of the small group of his followers began to resemble a scientific sect and to function as one. This rarely mentioned aspect of the history of Darwinism became still more outspoken by the foundation, at the initiative of Huxley and Hooker, of the “X Club”, which was thought of as a caucus or ring. Their aim was “to substantiate Darwinian evolution and turn Victorian Britain into a scientific [and atheistic] society.”

“Huxley wanted the introduction of a scholarly and ethical form of science, open to merit; he wanted the overthrow of the clergy, aristocrats, and social climbers; and he wanted to use Darwinism as a Whitworth gun, to bring about a ‘New Reformation’ that would sweep away ‘the scum of rotten hypocritical conventionalists which clogs art, literature, science and politics’.” This was no less than a cultural coup which would profoundly mark the future of the biological sciences, and continues to do so today. They were “a meritocratic conspiracy” which drew its grit from the struggles Huxley and Hooker had had to fight in their early lives. “Collectively they were unstoppable. They nominated each other for awards, refereed each other for jobs, published each other’s work, sponsored each other’s lecture tours, awarded each other grants, and circulated each other’s achievements.”¹³

The feat Huxley is best remembered for, his confrontation in 1860 with Anglican bishop Samuel Wilberforce during a meeting at Oxford, should be seen against this background. According to the traditional account of that confrontation Wilberforce attacked the new evolutionary theory in a speech, and ended with the question whether Darwin was related to the apes on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side. Huxley claimed to have replied: “If this question were put to me, I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather than a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence, but who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion – I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.”¹⁴

The argumentative power of this reply is weak and its historicity doubtful. Wilberforce was a learned man whose 17,000 words critique of the Origin was published in a prestigious quarterly a few days after the debate. “What really happened [at that meeting] receded behind a fog bank of embellishment. Each of the players in the drama offered his own version in which he came best,” writes Carl Zimmer.¹⁵ For Joseph Hooker was also present and would write to Darwin “that he himself had taken on Wilberforce: ‘I smacked him amid rounds of applause.’ Both Huxley and Hooker were telling stories that would do two things: raise their stature in Darwin’s eyes, and leave him indebted to them.”¹⁶

And what about the title of the famous book on the origin of species? “Darwin was not able to present a single instance of speciation by natural selection in The Origin of Species.” There were plenty of examples of artificial selection by dog- and pigeon-breeders, in which the human breeders provided the selecting intelligence. But even then “Darwin had to admit, when challenged, that he could provide no cases of animal-breeders producing a new species. Such breeding had definitely produced different varieties, but not a single new species.”¹⁷ As the authoritative Ernst Mayr states concisely: “Darwin himself failed to solve the problem of speciation.”¹⁸ – “If there is one thing The Origin of Species is not about,” affirms to Steve Jones, “it is the origin of species.”¹⁹

What Darwin Really Said

At the time Charles Darwin composed his theory genes were not known, the cell was a blob of jelly called ‘plasm’, dinosaurs did not roam the landscape of popular culture, and (the white-skinned) Homo sapiens still ranked at the top of the tree of life. Darwin’s Darwinism was very different from the ‘Darwinism’ of the neo-Darwinists some eighty or a hundred years later, now the basis of evolution as presented by the media, and therefore commonly supposed to be the thought of the great man himself.

We have seen that Darwin’s conversion was a turning away from his religious belief towards an agnostic materialism. Instead of the mystic vision of natural theology, he wanted an explanation of the species based on science. “Undoubtedly the most significant factor that contributed to the success of Darwinian theory after 1859 was the fact that it was the first genuine attempt to bring the study of life on Earth fully into the conceptual sphere of science,” notes Michael Denton.²⁰ And Darwin himself wrote: “I had two distinct objects in view: firstly to show that species had not been separately created [as taught by the Christian religion], and second, that natural selection [a scientific mechanism] had been the chief agent of change.”²¹

When the Renaissance had made the return of science possible – la nuova scienza – Galileo Galilei picked up where the ancient Greek scientists had had to leave off. He defined the principles of science which are still valid today. 1. Science should be about matter. This is now so self-evident that it is seldom a point of consideration. 2. Science has no grasp of wholes, but has to reduce all things to parts consisting of smaller parts consisting of still smaller parts. 3. All changes in matter are brought about by external forces. This excludes any kind of internal movement or life. 4. Science can only work with the ‘primary’ qualities of things: extension, motion, and mass. ‘Secondary’ qualities, like colour, scent or taste, are effects of the primary qualities. 5. The language of science is mathematics, based on measurement. 6. In science all guesses, theses, or theories have to be tested as to their truth and reality. The time of fantasies and superstitions belongs to the past. The foundation of the New Science is “the scientific method” and its key-procedure the experiment. The elements of this enumeration have been, point for point, of immense importance in the latest four centuries.

It was within this framework of science that Darwin had to shift his reasoning from a world as perceived by natural theology. Anything he had been and was studying since his voyage on the Beagle was intuitively weighed against these premises. The wondrous results of breeding, which made a chihuahua from a wolf, were one of his strongest arguments. “The variation of domestic animals provided Darwin not only with evidence of the power of selection but also with irrefutable evidence that organisms could indeed undergo a considerable degree of evolutionary change.” Another argument was the at the time still scarce paleonthological knowledge: “Paleontology also provided Darwin with evidence that evolution had occurred. The fossil record revealed that the history of life on Earth was overall one of progress from simple to more complex types of life.”²²

Then what did Darwin actually say? According to André Pichot the Darwinian thesis can be summarized as follows: “1. More living beings are born than the natural resources are able to feed. [‘This’, comments Pichot, ‘is the thesis of Malthus, but considerably expanded and applied to the whole of the animal kingdom.’] 2. The various members of a species show very slight individual differences – for reasons which are not explained. 3. The beings which improve their individual differences have the advantage in the competition for the natural resources. 4. Accumulation of the slight differences, selected in this way, results in the creation of new species.”²³ – “In essence,” writes Michael Denton, “the scientific mechanism [proposed by Darwin] depended on only three premises each of which were practically self-evident: that organisms varied; that these variations could be inherited; and that all organisms were subject to an intense struggle for existence which was bound to favour the preservation by natural selection of beneficial variations.”²⁴

“Never were so many facts explained by so few assumptions,” marvels Richard Dawkins,²⁵ who labels himself an “arch-Darwinist.” Pichot is less impressed and finds “Darwin’s thesis rather clumsy and hardly coherent.”²⁶ Claude Allègre concurs: “Darwin’s book proves indeed very little. For the most part it rests on conjectures, as Darwin does not muster the scientific elements essential to establish his theory.”²⁷ The broadsides come not only from French territory, the Anglo-Saxons too can be stridently critical. Robert Koons writes: “Darwin’s so-called theory is not really a theory at all: it is a schema for future theories,” and he sees Darwin’s voluminous writings as “a stack of promissory notes for future theories.”²⁸ David Berlinski is still more cutting: “By the standards of the serious sciences, Darwin’s theory of evolution remains little more than a collection of anecdotal remarks.”²⁹

Darwin was under attack from the very day the Origin was published. Even his “four musketeers” had issues of strong disagreement with him. Huxley, his ‘bulldog’, never believed in the process of natural selection and warned Darwin against gradualism. Lyell and Gray stuck to their opinion that variations (the “minor individual differences”) were directed by providential influence rather than by ‘scientific’ chance. And Herbert Spencer “eagerly devoured Lamarck’s evolutionary theories and, interestingly enough, he never really wavered from them, remaining unconvinced by Darwin.”³⁰ Even Ernst Haeckel, the German scientist who was Darwin’s most active propagandist, remained heavily influenced by Lamarck.

Of course, the objections from the Christian side never diminished in number or clamour. Copernicus’ theory had undermined the Aristotelian universe of the Middle Ages and caused it to collapse, resulting in a general sense of insecurity and doubt. And see, now this Charles Darwin dared to assert in print that the human being, made in the image of God and therefore most noble among creatures, descended from the ape. An examination of the reactions to Darwin’s thesis shows that, intuitively, intelligent people knew that there must be truth in the assertion, for the resemblances between human and primate are obvious. But every important new idea evokes the full spectrum of reactions, from enthusiastic approval over hesitation or bewilderment to frantic denial. And so did Darwin’s “dangerous idea.”

But: “Darwin may not have convinced people of natural selection. He did, however, convince them of the fact of evolution.”³¹

What Darwin Could Not Know

In the standard version of history, the dawning of human culture happened about 10,000 years ago. Humans, mental beings, have always been asking the elementary questions about the beginnings of the universe, their own origin, the meaning of life and death. And they have always found or accepted answers to the questions of their ignorance. In the course of time the confined worlds of the human tribes have expanded, and the boundaries of their narrow egos have been relaxed, step by insecure step. Ignorance is fundamental; increasing enlightenment is the goal of humanity’s crusade, still far from the Jerusalem that has to be conquered.

This sort of reflection is more than hyperbole. Science has always, in any period of history, assumed that it had reached the top of the hill of knowledge, striking up hymns of triumph. But looking back into the records of its errors, feuds and blind-alleys, one learns that even a Newton and an Einstein could be mistaken – actually could not but be mistaken – and that science, by way of speaking, keeps hitting its head against the wall of Truth or Reality. What, then, about our world of cars, airplanes and computers, are they not proof of the triumph of science? Actually it is a world for the most part created by technology, by the engineer. Science strives for understanding and knowledge, technology finds ways to make things – and existed long before our successful modern science. That both meet at many intersections should not efface the difference.

“If anyone was chasing a phantom or retreating from empiricism, it was surely Darwin, who himself freely admitted that he had absolutely no hard empirical evidence that any of the major evolutionary transformations he proposed had ever actually happened,” writes Michael Denton in his Evolution – A Theory in Crisis. “There can be no question that Darwin had nothing like sufficient evidence to establish his theory of evolution. … None of his claims received any direct experimental support until nearly a century had elapsed.”³² Michael Behe, another critic of Darwin, points out “how little Darwinian processes explain and how much is not understood.”³³

The fact is that Darwin could not substantiate his theory scientifically: the biological sciences in his day were not sufficiently advanced to provide the supporting evidence. He himself conceded: “It deserves especial notice that the more important objections [to his theory] relate to questions on which we are confessedly ignorant; nor do we know how ignorant we are.”³⁴

At the root of the origin of species lay the origin of life on our planet. Living things had to appear in non-living matter before they could branch out in a ‘tree of life’. Today the extremely improbable accident of life’s origin is as mysterious as ever. Darwin took the safe road and avoided the question. He wrote to a correspondent: “You expressed correctly my views where you said that I had intentionally left the question of the Origin of Life uncanvassed as being altogether ultra vires [beyond our powers] in the present state of our knowledge.”³⁵

We have seen how problematic the age of the Earth was in Darwin’s time. Buffon, Hutton and Lyell had gradually increased the numbers from thousands to millions and hundreds of millions of years. “In 1795, James Hutton, the founder of modern geology believed that the surface features of the Earth were shaped gradually by incremental changes extending over enormous lengths of time. He realized that millions of years would be needed to accumulate rock sediments and to raise and erode mountains.”³⁶ The huge time span of Lyell’s geological eras was one of the reasons Darwin leaned so heavily on his gradualism. As he had no idea how the mechanisms of individual variation and inheritance could function, he had to posit minute gradual changes “over time”, much, much time, to make his miracles acceptable.

Fossils are embedded in geological sediments which form strata. These findings were one of Darwin’s two pillars of the evolution of the species (the other was the results of breeding, proof to him that “descent with modification” was possible). As Darwin did not know how old the Earth was, he could not know how old the fossils were. “The best he and other scientists of his day could say was that a given fossil came from a certain geological period.”³⁷ At that time there were still enormous gaps in the fossil record. “During the 1850s, orang-utans, chimpanzees and gorillas were beginning to emerge from their jungle obscurity, and Richard Owen [one of Darwin’s adversaries] dissected their bodies and studied their skeletons.”³⁸

The following paragraph from a science magazine dated March 1859 gives a glimpse of the situation in Darwin’s days: “In Africa there is a tribe of huge monkeys known by the name of Gorillas. Their existence has been known to white men for some years, but none have ever been taken alive. They live in the lonely retired seclusions of the forests, and the males are capable of coping in fight with the lion. The skull of one is in the Boston Museum, sent thither by the Rev. Mr. Wilson, a missionary. Last year, the body of one was sent from Sierra Leone to Prof. Owen, packed in a cask of rum. The males have a horrible appearance; they attain to a stature of five feet, with wrists four times the size of a man’s.”³⁹

As far as Darwin knew, fossil evidence for human evolution had not yet been found. “Java Man” was discovered in 1891 by Eugen Dubois, who was unjustly ridiculed for suggesting that he had found a link between the primates and Homo sapiens. The “Taung Child”, an Australopithecus africanus, was identified by Raymond Dart in 1924. Before Dart’s discovery Asia, not Africa, was considered to be the cradle of mankind. “Peking Man”, a Homo erectus, was found in 1926. And it was only in 1931 that the great discoveries started in central Africa. The problem of the missing link(s) will remain a bone of contention up to the present day.

The appearance of new species requires the inheritance of the useful variations. The lack of a mechanism for heredity was perhaps the biggest gap in Darwin’s theory. “Darwin had been one of a long series of biologists who could make no real headway in understanding heredity. Indeed, Darwin’s own ideas on the subject were far off the mark.” (Eldredge⁴⁰) “Darwin himself failed to solve the problem of speciation. … In 1859, when he published the Origin, he actually did not have a single clear-cut piece of evidence for the existence of selection.” (Mayr⁴¹) “Darwin was not able to present a single instance of speciation by natural selection in The Origin of Species … He had to admit, when challenged, that he could provide no cases of animal-breeders producing a new species. Such breeding had definitely produced different varieties, but not a single new species.” (Dennett⁴²)

It bears repetition: Charles Darwin could not know any of this indispensable data at the time of constructing his theory, nor could anybody else, simply because this knowledge was not yet available. “Darwin was acutely aware that the whole edifice he had constructed in the Origin was entirely theoretical. … The highly speculative nature of his evolutionary model was quite apparent to Darwin himself …” (Denton⁴³)

Then what was the validity of Darwin’s theory of evolution – of that what Darwin really did say? His system was a mental construction, an elaborated guess assembling and giving shape to various important ideas which were in the air. It was not based on scientific facts, but metaphorically on a geological (Lyell) and a socio-economic theory (Malthus).

A contention of this caliber demands expert support. Robert Koons writes: “Darwin’s so-called theory is not really a theory at all: it is a schema for future theories. … With the publication of The Origin of Species, Darwin produced a stack of promisory notes for future theories.”⁴⁴ And David Berlinski: “By the standards of the serious sciences, Darwin’s theory of evolution remains little more than a collection of anecdotal remarks.”⁴⁵ Opinions like these are contradicted in most cases not on the grounds of Darwin’s original system, but on what later has been put together as so-called ‘Darwinism’.

Both Koons and Berlinski are outspoken critics of Darwin, as is André Pichot who terms the awe in which Darwin and his work are held “the Darwinian mythology.” Daniel Dennett, on the contrary, is another ‘arch-Darwinian’, but he too has to admit that “no one knew better than Darwin himself the importance of anchoring a revolutionary theory in the bedrock of empirical fact, and he knew that he could only speculate, with scant hope in his own day of getting any substantive feedback.”⁴⁶

Darwin’s Legacy

Darwin’s Darwinism has met with difficult times in the course of its career and was around 1900 even declared death. But through gradual changes, additions and reinterpretations ‘Darwinism’ was “invented by the likes of Spencer, Haeckel, Galton, Weismann, de Vries. They were intentionally promoting Darwin, making evolution not only the central question in biology, but also of society, morals, religion, politics, etc. In short, they were making it into “the question that has remained fashionable.”⁴⁷ That they have succeeded is illustrated by the fact that Charles Darwin came fourth in the BBC’s 2002 “Great Britons” contest (behind Diana, Princess of Wales).

It is amazing how reverential materialistic scientists can be within the discipline to which they have dedicated their lives. Some evolutionary biologists have elevated Darwin above the angels. “At the Darwin Centennial in 1959, Julian Huxley delivered his famous oration announcing that evolution would be the new religion, leaving no doubt at all in the minds of those who were paying attention that many Darwinists were not simply disinterested scientists; they were definitely presenting a new worldview.”⁴⁸ And David Berlinski writes sarcastically: “Daniel Dennett’s assertion that natural selection has been demonstrated ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’ must be judged for what it is: the ecclesiastical bull of a most peculiar church, a cousin in kind to ecclesiastical bluff. When Steven Pinker affirms that ‘natural selection is the only explanation we have of how complex life can evolve,’ he is very much in the inadvertent position of the apostles. Much against his will, he is bearing witness.”⁴⁹

In the writings of evolutionary biologists one finds many references to passages in Darwin to prove a point. This, of course, is normal procedure. Yet the problem lies in the fact that Darwin, often in two minds, can be used to support all shades of opinion, even irreconcilable ones, like his own theory of evolution based on chance variations and Lamarck’s inheritance of acquired characteristics. As mentioned before, this mixture of opinions and principles has been added to in every edition of the Origin Darwin published during his lifetime. He admitted: “The more I think the more bewildered I become.”

The anti-religious evolutionists use Darwin as the epitome of materialism and atheism. This is evident in the mordant attack several proponents of ‘Darwinian’ evolution have recently been waging on religion, Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion and Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell among others. They rightly point to Darwin as their inspiration. Apparently hesitant and “agnostic,” it doubtlessly was Darwin’s intention to found his theory on scientific materialism, against the natural theology of clergyman Paley. As Stephen Gould put it: “Darwin applied a consistent philosophy of materialism in his interpretation of nature. Matter is the ground of all existence; mind, spirit, and God as well, are just words that express the wondrous results of neuronal complexity.”⁵⁰ Marcel Schutzenberger confirms this: “It was the intention of Charles Darwin to reduce the human being to an animal and to the laws of physics and chemistry.”⁵¹

It is intriguing to find in the writings of practically every materialistic biologist a kind of sick pleasure to demonstrate how much their science abases the human being. The ‘lord of creation’ has become a naked or neotenous ape, a bipedal brachiator. Darwin set the tone: “In The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin undermined the traditional anthropocentric interpretation that divided animals from human beings. He destroyed the notion that God created the Earth and all of its creatures for humankind. As part of his evolutionary theory, he sought to show the continuity of species and that ‘humans are not a separate divinely created species’.”⁵² According to Darwin: “Human beings are accidental and incidental products of the material development of the universe, almost wholly irrelevant and readily ignored in any general description of its functioning.”⁵³ “We evolved to survive and reproduce, to get food and shelter and mates and to raise our children. We did not evolve to get insights into life’s ultimate realities. What we do find is a bonus, and we expect that bonus to run out at some point.”⁵⁴

It was the debasement of the ‘lord of creation’ which contributed to Darwin’s feeling that exposing his ideas in public would be like confessing a murder. But here again he is ambivalent. As John Carey remarks: “Darwin regards the ‘victorious’ forms of life as ‘higher’ than the ‘beaten’ forms, and at times describes the battle for survival in nationalistic and imperialist terms,”⁵⁵ congratulating himself to be an Englishman. Dennett even quotes him as having written “that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is.”⁵⁶

The dark side of science is the logical consequence of its materialism. Particles of matter, whatever their size, shape or activity, cannot miraculously produce something else than matter, for the basic premise says that there is nothing but matter. Matter cannot produce life or a conscious mind. May one, then, suppose that the materialist scientist suffers from a split brain, one part of which sees nothing than matter, mechanisms and machines in his laboratory, and another with which he loves his wife, adores his children, reasons, and practices his science?

Darwin could not prove any essential point of his theory, but behind it all was the intent to put it on a material basis, and to let all traditional, non-materialistic ideas loose as so many balloons children play with. The science of biology, in its development far behind to the exact mathematical and physical sciences, tried to catch up with them. It had to wrestle with a serious problem, for as the word ‘biology’ says, it is about the knowledge of life. Matter and life seem to be two different categories. It is not that difficult to get a grip on the material component of living things, but the something that makes them alive remains impalpable.

If the individual is a human animal, his society must be an organization of human animals. Its chief law will be “the law of the fittest”, and the result must be bellum omnium versus omnes, a war of all against all. This interpretation of the human social relations, initially by Herbert Spencer, became known as ‘social biology’; it would be the norm in the capitalist society as well as in international politics. If the fittest are the ones that survive, gain the upper hand and grow into superior beings, then the superior society or nation would be the one in which the fittest are intentionally, scientifically cultivated.

Closely related to this dominant view was “eugenics,” usually associated with Hitler and Nazism, but widespread before the Second World War, especially in the Unites States. (See e.g. Edwin Black: War against the Weak – Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race.) Darwin stated the principle himself: “With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated, and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment … Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.”⁵⁷

If the human being consists exclusively of matter, then the way it functions is by mechanisms which make him into a Cartesian machine, or La Mettrie’s homme machine. The former still allowed for a rational soul; the latter drew the logical conclusion and denied the existence of a non-material soul too. Neurobiology as practiced nowadays reasons from precisely the same standpoint: the mind is a formation of the body, thought a secretion of the brain. Under reference to Darwin, any non-material phenomenon is automatically discarded as paranormal, supranormal, metaphysical or, worst of all, mystic. The brain is a product of material evolution, adapted to the increasing complexity of the evolving species. Evolutionary psychology now teaches us that our brain developed in the Stone Age populations of “hunter-gatherers,” and that we are forced to obey its primitive workings.

Darwin’s thought was only indirectly derived from the Enlightenment and belonged to the coarser post-Enlightenment of the nineteenth century. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, was quite idealistic and put Humanity on a pedestal; it also had an absolute faith in progress. Because of the industrial revolution, the rising tide of the masses and the commercial spirit of the bourgeoisie, the idea of progress had been tied to the ideal of science. But if matter was the one and only substance, and the human animal had evolved from the primate, what kind of progress, if any, could be expected in the long term?

Moreover, if the evolution of the species was a material, mechanical process, was it not a misinterpretation to qualify what evolved later as necessarily being higher? Higher according to which scale? Materialism had collapsed all existential levels of the Chain of Being and of Linnaeus’ classification into one: matter. That the human being thought of itself as higher than all other beings was vainglorious fancy. Copernicus had put the Earth in its right place as a planet among the other planets; Darwin had put the humans in their right place as animals among the other animals. Most Darwinian authors enjoy reminding their human readers of this “fact,” rubbing them with their noses into their animality, so to speak.

Finally, Darwinism is so often used as an argument against anything related to God, religion, spirituality, occultism or the paranormal, that it has become synonymous with godlessness. As mentioned before, some neo-Darwinians have gone on an all-out attack on creationism and “intelligent design,” a movement that in its scientific form finds the works of nature too complex to have been brought about by the material mechanism of ‘Darwinism’. We know about Darwin’s religious struggle, which resulted in agnosticism. His present-day followers are probably right in supposing that their idol, at bottom, was a religious non-believer. If so, however, the cause was much more the influence of the general intellectual attitude of his century on him than it was his own decision. Darwin always had difficulty to arrive at a decision. That he had nonetheless the courage to take some very important decisions, realizing the import of their ineluctable impact, is a main characteristic of his stature.